She wants to know whether I’ll have lunch with them and I say I can’t, I have to work. Have I had breakfast then? I say I haven’t, which isn’t the truth but I do it to make her happy. She serves me in the kitchen and I ask about Mauricio and he’s working and eating, doing very well, the scare is over.

Then I shut myself in my room.

I search for the letter. I put it in an envelope to preserve it from everything. It’s from her.

I find it. Her lovely handwriting. I read it, and her tender delicacy flows through it, even amid the prudent complaint, the muted alarm of the confusion I caused when I left her without giving any reason.

I set fire to it in the ashtray. Before that I caress it with the tips of my fingers.

There’s also the wooden letter opener that came by mail without any indication of who it was from. I’ve kept it all this while in case it was from her. I never used it. I think I should have used it, as she may have wished, to open a path through my readings. I’ll have to start doing that now, at last. I choose an uncut book called La veneración; I believe the title is appropriate.

•

Papá’s watch, with its worn silver plate . . . Still soft to the touch, just as before.

The gold Parker, which will be left to Mauricio.

I make out the companionable little noise of the alarm clock, audible from the night table; I haven’t been around, so it’s undoubtedly Mamá who’s been winding it.

I open a drawer, and my skin recognizes the little handle, polished smooth by my pulling on it since I was a child. Every piece of furniture bears the traces of my touch, they’ve shaped themselves to my habits, and my eyes have adapted to seeing them where they are.

A memory takes me down to a corner of the courtyard.

When I was a boy, for my entertainment, Papá tied a handful of balloons to a nail in the wall with string. Within a few days some of them had popped, and others had lost their air and become tiny and wrinkled. Someone took the balloons away, but the string stayed for a long time, I noticed it there years later, because it was under the eave and neither sun nor rain damaged it.

I don’t think I’ve remembered it since and don’t imagine it could possibly still be there. Still I want to see for myself.

I have no trouble locating that part of the wall and yes, the old bit of string certainly has disappeared, but the nail, under innumerable layers of whitewash, remains. Perhaps my father put it there with his own hands.